I’ve dived into digital and am doing away with book shelves; I’m a book worm and I am proudly giving up the printed page as quickly as I can. The future is liberating.

We hear a lot of talk about ebooks maturing and becoming mainstream, and I do hope we will see that soon. Sadly, publishers continue to drag their feet worse than the recording industry has and we will likely see tree and ink publishers go kicking and screaming into a better tomorrow. I decided to stop waiting, though, and have taken on the task of digitizing all of the books I have in my collection.

I began a serious purge of books last year when I moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Waterloo, Ontario. I had a lot of books and opted to sell and give away the majority of the books in my collection; I downloaded replacements for as many books as I could in digital formats. Even with a purge of many books, I moved with dozens of books that I care a great deal about and wouldn’t leave behind without a digital alternative.

In June I will be moving back to Nova Scotia and I have begun a scanning project. In late June, when I move, I will do so with no more than 5 physical books in my possession. Each other book and magazine will be scanned and passed along to someone else. I have already given to a book drive and will do the same again before I leave.

It’s a long process to digitize books; scanning each page with a cheap scanner can make each book an hours-long project. Even so, it’s better to act than to wait for publishers to catch up, so I’ve adopted a DIY attitude. I have scanned dozens of books and magazines that are not available in digital form during the past two months. I’m left with a collection of PDF files that will fit on a MicroSD card instead of filling shelves upon shelves.

As convenient as digital books are to read —I greatly prefer digital reading to paper reading—, the striking difference is in the clutter that will be in my living space. For the first time in my memory I will be without a book shelf, without a teetering stack of books and with every book I have loved in my pocket. That will feel great.

If you have the time, why not join me in being proactive in the move to digital books? A cheap scanner and a netbook would be all that is necessary to start the process. I’m very happy about the change so far.

In my life there have been few things that have shaken me and improved how I live as much as my discovery of the integral approach to living and understanding the world.

Integral as a theory is a synthesis of the truths from various disciplines, from hard sciences to religion to art to medicine to business, and from every aspect of our lives. As a lived experience, it is a comprehensive, practical and exciting emergence that offers a step beyond the partial and blinded approaches we have all lived through; every aspect of our lives enters into the embrace of our awareness and we can no longer ignore the invigorating delight of turning from nothing. It is a way to be more free and more whole that we are all called to.

But a “Theory of Everything” is incredibly daunting to many people. Ken Wilber, the leading integral thinker, has produced many long, intimidating and appendix-heavy books that detail his integral theory with incredible accuracy. 800 pages can understandably scare off a lot of people who could benefit themselves and others by applying the integral framework to their lives and their work.

I’ve been wishing for a book that I could give my parents, who are elementary school teachers, in order to introduce them to this integral stuff I’ve been so excited by for a while now. They’re the sort of people who don’t have a lot of time for theoretical reading but I suspect who would understand and appreciate integral. Finally, with Ken Wilber’s new book, The Integral Vision, we have a genuinely accessible and beautiful introduction to integral.

Subtitled “A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe and Everything”, The Integral Vision presents an integral framework – in the form of AQAL – in an entertaining and informative way, without some of the headier data and concepts that may turn some off from learning to use this valuable approach. The presentation is simple but still with a great scope, as all the major ingredients of the theory are explored and practical applications in personal growth (Integral Life Practice), business, medicine, ecology and religion are laid out. The text is peppered with beautiful illustrations, diagrams and photographs that bring the book to life, emphasizing that integral theory is a map of real territory that is meant to be lived with all the spice, fire and light we can bring to it.

There is no better way to dive into integral, so if you haven’t joined this adventure yet, what are you waiting for? Ken’s closing is a clarion call for our future:

~C4Chaos, one of my favourite internet personalities, posed the question, “What’s in your library?” and pointed to an article on the value of libraries to the successful. As a bookworm, I have to respond to that.

Like C4, I have been collecting Ken Wilber‘s books, though I envy his possession of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber. Also in my collection are fiction, graphic novels, meditation, yoga and religion books, art, photography and poetry collections, some magazines such as What is Enlightenment? and Shambhala Sun and an assortment of other treasures.

And then there is my sprawling digital collection that I wish to subsume the rest. I deeply want publishers to embrace digital media so that we can have a small hard drive rather than a room of books as our library. I just want to be able to fill a book chair with books to lend and leave the rest in 0s and 1s. Vast knowledge nested in minimalism is the future!

I should flesh out my Zaadz bookshelf and import what I list at All Consuming.

I’m between books at the moment, so I’d love some suggestions.